Things for December

Christmas... The time of year when you just want five sodding minutes of peace and bloody quiet to yourself, and traditionally there's no better or easier way of putting that message across than burying yourself in a big fat book. I did a similar post to this a few years ago, but here we are in an odd moment of motivation, and so it is - the "best" books a comic-liker could hope to find themselves reading over the festive period and beyond.

Apologies for this terrible picture - my camera's died, so this is the best my phone can offer.

The majority of these books can be found for a few pennies on Amazon Marketplace, but some of them you might have to look a bit further for... They're all definitely worth it though (if you like this sort of thing).

The Adventures of Miss Sapbody

Over on the Facebook group (have you joined yet? No worries if not, it's your call), BP Johnson asked about a page from an annual he used to have, which featured a "chaotic, anarchic school room scene with lots of naughty kids freaking out". Peter Gray (of Peter Gray's Comics - which now also has a Facebook thing) quickly identified it as a page from the 1987 Dandy book... And because I'm nice, here are the pages in question, and all the other related bits too. It's called The Puddlewick Playgroup, and it's unlike anything else in the Dandy at the time...

(Click them to make them bigger, obviously)

Drawn by Henry Davies, looking like something halfway between Steve Bell and Tom Paterson... the 1987 annual's full of it! Carry on below to see the rest, if you're up for it.

An explanation, of sorts...

Jim Petrie, 1932-2014

Bugger, another hero's gone - LOVE Jim's stuff, there's not many that give such a sense of "movement" as his wildly spinning limbs and so on do. Plus the weird facial expressions, false teeth popping out, massive tongues... There won't be another like him, that's for sure.

At least his legacy's all there on paper - for Minnie the Minx alone, according to Jim, there's "2000 weekly instalments, 400 annual stories, 35 summer specials and 7 libraries - total, 2,082!".

Freddy the Fearless Fly - as you've (maybe) never seen him before!

Apologies for the lack of blah blah blah, I've been tired/busy/sick/apathetic blah blah blah. Here's something fun while I'm getting the next "big" thing ready - it's the Dandy's "classic" character, Freddy the Fearless Fly, re-jigged by you-know-who:

Notice the infamous sock that Freddy lives in?

Also be noting the Dandy's usage of "desperate" as a substitute for "inebriated".

These are the only two of these I can find for now - but at least it's something. More fun stuff to blah blah blah future!

Joining In with Terry Bave

Everyone else has already mentioned this, but hey - let's join in! Terry Bave's now blogging (or plugging - hopefully it'll go beyond the one post talking about his new book).

To "celebrate", here's a couple of interesting Bave-bits. The first of which is his contribution to Cartoon Aid - a charity event in 1988, run by CITV, that asked kids to design a cartoon character and be rewarded with a trip to Disneyland. Not only that, but their character would then be "brought to life" by a professional cartoonist, and all of those characters would then be put into a nice big hardback book. The profits of this book all went to the Wad Sherifay Refugee Camp in Sudan.

Of the 36,000 entries received, there was one overall winner, and fifteen regional winners (who were all rewarded with a trip to Frankfurt). And who were those "professional cartoonists" that were on board? Well, amongst other people there was Bryan Hitch (of Marvel fame), Patrick Gallagher (Oink!), Mike Collins (Marvel and DC), Simon Donald (Viz) and Davy Francis (Oink!, again). Oh, and Terry Bave, of course. Here's what him and Shiela did for it:

And here's a mini-profile on the guy, with a photo as well! All the winners of the campaign got to meet these fine comic-folk, and most of them had their pictures taken with them as well.

Now, why couldn't that competition have been running when I was in school? Bah, etc.

More from that book in the future, but for now we're all about Terry, so here's a Winker Watson he did for the Dandy in 2001, in which Watson and Creep meet their maker, so to speak:

Good, eh?

A slightly delayed look at the last ever Dandy, Part 3 - who was missing!

Here we go, the reason this post was so long in producing. It's...

25 Dandy Characters Who Perhaps Should've Had A Place In The Top 75 Dandy Characters Ever

And that's shouting! Admittedly, this lot are mostly from 1988-2001 or thereabouts, but this is my list and those were my years for the Dandy.

So, in no particular order, here we go:

A slightly delayed look at the last ever Dandy - Part 2

As was just "discussed", the last ever Dandy took the form of a countdown of the 75 greatest characters to ever grace its pages, and naturally they couldn't include everyone's favourites. In the Dandy's penultimate panel, Nigel Parkinson stuck in a few characters that were missing from the main list:

Whilst I'm not usually "into" Nigel Parkinson's stuff (the drawings are fine, it's the colours I disagree with - something just seems off about them), I do really, really like this picture. Even though it's sodding Hey Jude AGAIN.

This is that list, with occasional "thoughts" in brackets:

75-Meddlesome Matty

74-Plum MacDuff

73-Tom Tum

72-Auntie Clockwise (hated this back in the day, but the version here's amusing)

71-Mitch and his Mummy

70-The Burrd

69-Sir Coward de Custard

68-Jolly Roger

67-Hamish the Haggis Basher

66-Kid Cops

65-Monkey Bizness!

64-Marvo the Wonder Chicken

63-Bamboo Town (should've been a LOT higher on the list, I love these!)

62-Bing-Bang Benny (ditto)

61-The Tricks of Screwy Driver

60-Old Ma Murphy

59-Izzy Skint

58-Tin Lizzie

57-Bertie Buncle and his Chemical Uncle

56-Freddy the Fearless Fly

55-Joe White and the Seven Dwarves

54-Owen Goal

53-Wacko!

52-Pre-Skool Prime Minister (the one Jamie Smart comic I enjoy)

51-Claude Hopper

50-Jak and Todd (?!?!??!?!?!? - No no no NO)

49-Peter Piper

48-Hungry Horace

47-Simples! 101 Ways to Use a Meercat (Yes, the final years of the Dandy had a strip based on an insurance comparison website)

46-Bad Grandad (absolutely horrible, the worst thing to ever appear in the Dandy - and not just because the title character's design is a straight copy of Carl Fredrickson from Up)

45-Peter's Pocket Grandpa

44-Strange Hill

43-Old King Cole

42-The Umbrella Men

41-Pepperoni Pig

40-Julius Sneezer

39-Pinky's Crackpot Circus

38-The Bogies (no, no, no)

37-Agent Dog 2 Zero (another triple NO)

36-Robin Hood's Schooldays

35-Ollie Fliptrick

34-Big Head and Thick Head

33-Dinah Mo (a nice surprise - thought she'd've been LONG forgotten about)

32-Jibber and Steve

31-Harry and his Hippo

30-Our Teacher's a Walrus

29-The Talking Ball

28-My Dad's a Doofus! (a quadruple NO)

27-Ali Ha-Ha and the 40 Thieves

26-Dirty Dick

25-Nuke Noodle (seriously?)

24-Postman Prat

23-Greedy Pigg

22-My Freaky Family

21-Hyde and Shriek

20-Desperate Dawg

19-Jack Silver

18-Blinky (a Beezer refugee who found his home in the Dandy for many hilarious years)

17-Keyhole Kate

16-Black Bob

15-Mr. Meecher, the Uncool Teacher (I like this, but the 15th best ever?)

14-My Own Genie (Oh, don't be silly)

13-The Arena of Awesome (?!?£"$?"?!?£*$&")

12-Harry Hill's Real-Life Adventures in TV Land

11-Cuddles & Dimples

10-Bully Beef & Chips

09-Smasher

08-Beryl the Peril (a Topper character who didn't join the Dandy until the 1990s, but alright then)

07-Bananaman (similarly, he was born in Nutty but will always belong to the Dandy)

06-The Jocks and the Geordies

05-Korky the Cat

04-Brassneck

03-Winker Watson

02-Corporal Clott

01-Desperate Dan (of course)

So, who do I believe deserved a place on this list? Find out in the next post...

A (slightly delayed) look at the last ever Dandy - Part 1

Humble apologies - this post here was intended for early December, but festive shenanigans got in the way (and took priority too). Plus, there's a LOT of back-issue scouring involved, and the scanning and the cropping and the re-sizing... All very annoying but hopefully worth it.

Anyway, the last ever issue of the Dandy then. For a start, it was hard to get hold of thanks to the wonderful folk at WH Smith's (we requested ten copies for our shop, they sent one - and people wonder why the comic industry's dying a slow, sad death?). Eventually I ended up with three of them, so that's alright. 

Now, how to best celebrate the final issue of a British institution, with characters familiar to generations of comic-lovers? How about getting someone to knock out a mess of bug-eyed, barely recognisable scribbles during his lunch break? Yeah, that'll do:

Ken Harrison drew a far more appropriate, and all-round more respectful design as well, but this was relegated to the back cover:

How about doubling the demand by producing two different covers? Empire and gamesTM both did it for their celebration issues, why not the Dandy? Oh, DC Thomson, how you boggle the mind!

The cover promises "75 Classic Stories", but this is far from the truth. The comic takes the form of a countdown of the 75 greatest Dandy characters of all time, but the vast majority of these are done by the very people who helped to finish off the comic. Alex Matthews does a good job of Wacko and Tin Lizzie, Nigel Auchterlonie's Korky's a bit of fun, Wilbur Dawbarn does a VERY nice Robin Hood's Schooldays, and Lew Stringer's Smasher's a good one too - but for the most part the characters that shaped the childhood of thousands of people are reduced to throwaway three-panel (or even single panel), somewhat mean-spirited gags. 

Wouldn't it have been more respectful (and indeed, cheaper!) to fill the entire comic with reprints? As in, showing the characters in the form they took that made the Dandy the success it (mostly) was? Also, and with specific reference to Stuart Munro here, as quoted on Lew Stringer's blog:

"I also drew Hamish The Haggis Basher. It's a Tom Paterson strip that only appeared in one annual in the 80's, I had no picture reference and haven't read the strip, which is a first for me!"

Yeah, good one, that's respecting your influences there. Don't bother reading the thing, just make it up.

Which brings me to the next point - why did they even bother messing with the Dandy in the first place? Why not, back in 2004, turn the entire Dandy into a comic full of reprints, with the cover being the only new content each week? It worked for Buster for around ten years, and even then it was only shut down because the publishers couldn't be bothered with it anymore.

Meanwhile, all these new characters and the artists that came with them could've found work in a new, seperate title launched by DC Thomson - called 100% Funny or something. If this would've lasted for as long as the 2010 version of the Dandy lasted, it'd be a minor success (akin to Monster Fun in terms of longevity), and become an odd little footnote in comics history. You know, instead of being the thing that put the final nail in the coffin of Britain's longest-running comic.

Overall, we've the final years of the Dandy to thank for introducing Wilbur Dawbarn, Nigel Auchterlonie and Alex Matthews to a wider audience, and the best of luck to those three.

Xmas is here...

Well, Christmas Eve anyway. And there IS something special about Christmas Eve that makes it stand out more than any other day in the year, even more than "the big day" itself. Bill Murray (who else?) puts it best:

With this being the last post here before Xmas happens, I'd just like to say a MASSIVE thank you to everyone who's been following this thing since it started in July. Anyone who's commented on it or just looked at it, and obviously ANYONE can "do a blog", but... I'm still grateful, really.

So, in keeping with the season - join in!

Sing some songs:

Have some parties:

Be NICE for a change (or nicer than usual, if you're already nice):

Remember who your friends are (and that's ALL the time, not just at this time of year):

And overall, have a smashing Christmas:

Cheers!

Minor Dandy Obscurities

Just one more quick Dandy thing before it's all over (not to say there won't be Dandy-based stuff here in the future - it's just I like to work with loose themes). Here are several things that appeared in the comic during the late 1980s and early 1990s - and they don't seem to be remembered by most people. I like them anyway - and if you DO remember them, good for you!

First up is James, the World's Worst Schoolboy, by Jimmy Glen. I've talked about him before, but this one's worth seeing:

It's the complete lack of sense that's amusing with this one, and also the bit with the teacher crying. Really it's just nine funny pictures, but it's fun.

Richard's Snitch (by... Gordon Bell?) is just plain odd. A boy with a big nose, and that big nose has a face. And a mind of its own.

From the 1986 Summer Special is this Kath & Mouse, a set of characters I've never seen anywhere else. Reading this one as a seven-year-old stirred up a variety of confusing new feelings, so there's that.

Why is there a tentacle under the bed?

And finally, another nice bit of Tom Paterson-based joy. The World's Daftest Discoveries with David Chattenborough was a series of splash pages packed with all sorts of jokes, silly words and strange things to look at. The third of these featured "The Hairy Highland Haggis Hatchery of Glen MacHyooch":

One day, some sensible person will collect the complete works of Mr. Paterson and put them into a massive heavy book. One day.

The Dandy nears its end - so go back to the start

Here it goes again - the scanning's complete so things can get back to normal without any strange green women standing around. Less than a week to go until the Dandy dies, sort of. Look at it a number of ways...

-Some might say that it's NOT dead, because it's carrying on in a digital form (this doesn't count).

-Some are counting the current issue as the last one (due to next week's "official" last ever issue being a bumper celebration/funeral sort of affair, this week's being the last of the standard format ones).

-Then there's the folk who believe that the Dandy died whenever "their version" of it ceased to exist (that's me!).

For me, that "version" would be the one that ended in October 2004, just before it turned into something that was less a comic, more a magazine-with-occasional-comic-strips (and then THAT would morph into that hideously unmentionable incarnation). So really, and I'm certain I'm not alone in saying this, but the REAL "last ever" Dandy looked like this:

And it was catastrophic reinvention after reinvention after reinvention following this issue, leading us to the sad state we find the Dandy in today (for those late to the party, Lee James Turnock sums it all up hilariously). And it IS depressing, and depressing things aren't fun to write about. Instead, we'll be looking at where the Dandy all started for me on a personal level, back in the Summer of 1992 in a now-defunct newsagents...

Yep, we're looking at the 1992 Dandy Summer Special!

More Beano things

Typical, isn't it? I spend weeks looking through all my stuff for amusing alternative takes on the Beano, spend an evening posting them all up here, then two days later a couple more turn up. Not to worry though, because here they are. And they're both (sort of) the fault of Kev F. Sutherland.

Back in the early 1990s, Mr. Sutherland ran a comic called UT. One of the "regular things" about the comic (and one which may ultimately've led to its demise) was the back cover being an upside-down parody of another comic or magazine, such as Hello!, Shoot or, in this case, The Beano. And a fairly convincing knock-up it is, too:

That particular cover leads into a typically surreal (and VERY un-Beano-ish) episode of Funny Bunnies by Phil Baber. Just for the fun of it all, here it is:

The next item is also from a Kev Sutherland product (and POSSIBLY drawn by him too). It's from the first issue of Zig and Zag's Zogazine, a comic based on that puppet duo (obviously), with each issue following a loose theme. For the first issue, that theme was comics, and one of the features is this nice spread, titled Zig and Zag's Wacky World of Comics. Not only does it feature a Beano spoof, it also satirizes The Dandy, The Topper, 2000AD, Action Comics, The Fantastic Four, Eagle, The Amazing Spider-Man and even Viz!

Click on it to read it "properly", of course. 

Oh, and now that I've done this, logic dictates I'll find more takes on the  Beano within the week.